Judge Howard Matz called it “an unusual and extreme picture of a prosecution gone badly awry.” He vacated all three FCPA convictions in Lindsey Manufacturing Co. (C.D. Cal.) in December 2011, citing false grand jury testimony from an FBI agent, material falsehoods in warrant affidavits, and improperly reviewed attorney-client communications.
That’s one of six documented DOJ misconduct or mishap cases across only 26 FCPA trials ever brought under 15 U.S.C. § 78dd.
The Africa Sting prosecutions, the DOJ’s self-described “turning point” in FCPA enforcement, ended with charges against all 22 defendants ultimately resolved without conviction in 2012. Judge Richard Leon in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called the government’s conspiracy theory one that pushed “its already generous elasticity to its outer limits.” The jury foreman in the second trial wrote publicly that the jury believed the defendants had “acted in good faith and the FBI/DOJ in bad faith.”
In U.S. v. Baptiste & Boncy (D. Mass.), the FBI destroyed recordings the defense argued were exculpatory, then destroyed a disk containing evidence of that destruction. It didn’t stop there: the DOJ dismissed with prejudice weeks before retrial began, after new exculpatory text messages surfaced from an FBI server. Judge Allison Burroughs had already granted a new trial for ineffective assistance of counsel in 2020.
In U.S. v. O’Shea (S.D. Tex.), Judge Lynn Hughes dismissed the FCPA charges, saying the government’s principal witness “knows almost nothing.”
The most recent case is U.S. v. Rovirosa, where a judge dismissed the indictment and granted acquittal on Confrontation Clause grounds. With the dismissal final, the DOJ faces a decision on appeal.
— James Okafor